Albert Camus quotes

“Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.”

— Albert Camus

“After all, every murderer when he kills runs the risk of the most dreadful of deaths, whereas those who kill him risk nothing except promotion.”

— Albert Camus

“In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.”

— Albert Camus

“We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.”

— Albert Camus

“We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.”

— Albert Camus

“You have to be very rich or very poor to live without a trade.”

— Albert Camus

“There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.”

— Albert Camus

“To abandon oneself to principles is really to die - and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.”

— Albert Camus

“To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.”

— Albert Camus

“We call first truths those we discover after all the others.”

— Albert Camus

“Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.”

— Albert Camus

“To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn't everything.”

— Albert Camus

“For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.”

— Albert Camus

“The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.”

— Albert Camus

“The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.”

— Albert Camus

“Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.”

— Albert Camus

“We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.”

— Albert Camus

“For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.”

— Albert Camus

“Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion.”

— Albert Camus

“Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.”

— Albert Camus

“The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.”

— Albert Camus

“To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.”

— Albert Camus